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Regent’s Teaching Forum started today with a presentation by myself and Zoe Sujon on using Google Expeditions at Regents University. We finished the session using Poll Everywhere to ask the audience how they could use GE with their classes….above is a screen shot of their responses.

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I went to the #BjorkDigital exhibition yesterday at Somerset House and really enjoyed the experience. The exhibition is in several different rooms and starts with a film called Black Lake. This consisted of two films projected on opposite sides of the room. As you’d expect from Bjork this was a bit arty and I was really impressed with the sound set in the room. It was a good introduction for what came next.

We then went into four other rooms and saw four different Virtual Reality films that Bjork had made and viewed them through the VR headsets. The first one was her singing on an Icelandic landscape, the second was being in the singer’s mouth and the third about quicksand and the final one was her literally growing in front of our eyes! These are amazing pieces of art and are really something different and new but I had also come to what potential they had for learning technology.

The first thing that I was really impressed with was how immersive the whole VR experience can be. Previously I had only used the Google cardboard headsets which are cheap and cheerful but the sets we used at the exhibition are in a different class. We used Oculus Rift the Samsung Gear sets with top quality headsets for the sound. Wearing the sets shuts out all background noise or vision so that you are totally unaware of the other 24 people in the room. At times it literally felt like you could reach out and touch the objects or images in front of you!

The potential for VR in Learning technology is incredible – there are so many 2D experience that lecturers can only describe or hint at that could be addressed with this type of technology…but that’s a topic of a future post..watch this space…